Even in Defeat, at Least the Heat Had a Shot at It

The question was easy to answer, even as you looked at the glum faces in the Miami Heat’s locker room and walked through the silenced, confetti-less American Airlines Arena after the Detroit Pistons’ victory in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference finals.

Would you rather have the Heat’s season or the Lakers?

The answer, of course, is Miami’s. Despite this excruciating 88-82 defeat that denied the franchise its first trip to the NBA Finals.

All you can realistically ask for in the NBA is a shot at a title. By acquiring Shaquille O’Neal last summer, the Heat had one.

In his biggest game with the Heat, O’Neal had 27 points and nine rebounds, not exactly the 32 and 18 he had in his first do-or-die game with the Lakers in the first round against Sacramento in 2000.

Perhaps a team can no longer hop on Shaquille O’Neal’s back and ride all the way to a championship. But it can sit on his shoulders and take a peek.

That’s where Miami’s season ended, with the Heat and an arena packed with red-clad fans peering over the fence at the NBA Finals, so close that they could almost see the green water of the Riverwalk in San Antonio.

The Heat had the ball and the lead with just over two minutes left in Game 7.

How many other teams would want to be in that position, including both residents of Staples Center?

“You’ll take that at any point,” Heat guard Eddie Jones said. “Up [two], 2 1/2 minutes left. Man, that close. You’re that close.”

Of course, this was just after Jones said this feeling hurt worse than Miami’s 25-win season two years ago, a little while after Keyon Dooling had called this season a “failure”, right before Shaquille O’Neal said he felt “a little bit hurt” emotionally after his first year in Miami.

Any of those terms sounded better than the “humbling” description that came from the Lakers after their season ended April 20.

If you can make it to the conference finals, you can make it to the championship. If you can make it to the championship, you can even knock off the favorites, as the Pistons did last year in dismantling the Lakers.

You want a chance. Then you see what happens. Maybe the opponent will choke away a 15-point lead in the fourth quarter of Game 7. Perhaps the ball finds its way to Robert Horry in time for him to make a game-winning and three-pointer.

The Heat didn’t have luck on its side. Even on the way to a win in Game 5, Miami watched star guard Dwyane Wade go down with a rib injury. It kept him out of Game 6 and limited him to seven-for-20 shooting in Game 7.

O’Neal came in with a bruised right thigh, and it wasn’t until the last two games that he posted numbers anywhere near his career playoff averages.

But you play the series and you get a chance. I don’t know what the mathematical probability of the Heat winning it all was, but it had to be better than the 1.4% chance the Lakers had of winning the draft lottery.

Meanwhile, that giant whoosh sound you heard emanating from just south of LAX wasn’t a 747 taking off, it was Laker officials exhaling that they won’t be subjected to a couple of weeks’ worth of Shaquille O’Neal clowning around on the national stage of the Finals. This goes down as the highlight of their 2004-05 season.

I’m sad that I had to go all the way to Miami to experience the excitement that used to fill Staples Center every spring, to feel that surge that only a close Game 7 can generate. This should still be happening in Los Angeles.

It’s interesting that owner Jerry Buss helped explain the Lakers’ 34-48 season by lamenting injuries to Vlade Divac, Devean George and Lamar Odom but never considered the injuries to Karl Malone and even Horace Grant last year when deciding to break up the old team.

This Laker season can’t be called anything but a failure.

As for the Heat, it’s probably not the proper time to ask.

“It was a phenomenal season, but we’ve got to win the whole thing,” O’Neal said. “Nobody’s really going to remember us winning 59 games or sweeping through the first two rounds. We had a lot of opportunities to win this thing. But we just made too many mistakes.

“We just fell short. It’s unfortunate that we fell short. We’re going to have to look back on this year and figure what we did wrong and we’ve got to start from the bottom next year.”

O’Neal sees things in terms of championships delivered -- zero -- not tickets and jerseys sold or even attitudes shifted.

Miami has always been a football town, be it the Dolphins or the Hurricanes. But instead of spring practice, the talk this year was hoops.

“I don’t know if it’s starting to shift, but I know this: this is a crazy basketball city right now,” said Hurricane Coach Larry Coker before the game. “Miami, they love winning.... I know tonight it’s a shift to basketball, and I’m OK with that. I’m going to enjoy it.”

Glen Rice, who played for the Heat from 1989 to ’95 and was on the Lakers’ 2000 championship team, has attended most of the playoff games this year and said “It’s not like any buzz I’ve ever seen since I’ve lived in Miami. The electricity I felt in this arena was unlike any other time.”

But perhaps the basketball newcomers were a little too naive that teams don’t just fall into championships. Remember, it took four seasons after the arrival of O’Neal and Kobe Bryant until they had their first parade.

The Heat held a giant fete for O’Neal’s arrival last summer.

They won’t have a championship. But it’s still been a season worth celebrating.

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J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a.adande@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Adande, go to latimes.com/adande.